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Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

This week's Slashdot questions go to Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, before that SunSITE) since it first went live in August, 1992. Ibiblio hosts the world's largest Linux archive (including the LDP), plenty of streamed and downloadable music, the world's longest-running Web cartoon (Dr. Fun), and thousands of texts on topics too numerous to list here. This is truly "the public's library and digital archive," 100% GPL, copyleft, and/or public domain, sponsored jointly by the Center for the Public Domain and UNC. Lots of people talk about free online publishing. Paul Jones just does it, day after day, year after year. Ask him whatever you want; we'll send 10 of the highest moderated questions to him and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

This week's Slashdot questions go to Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, before that SunSITE) since it first went live in August, 1992. Ibiblio hosts the world's largest Linux archive (including the LDP), plenty of streamed and downloadable music, the world's longest-running Web cartoon (Dr. Fun), and thousands of texts on topics too numerous to list here. This is truly "the public's library and digital archive," 100% GPL, copyleft, and/or public domain, sponsored jointly by the Center for the Public Domain and UNC. Lots of people talk about free online publishing. Paul Jones just does it, day after day, year after year. Ask him whatever you want; we'll send 10 of the highest moderated questions to him and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

This week's Slashdot questions go to Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, before that SunSITE) since it first went live in August, 1992. Ibiblio hosts the world's largest Linux archive (including the LDP), plenty of streamed and downloadable music, the world's longest-running Web cartoon (Dr. Fun), and thousands of texts on topics too numerous to list here. This is truly "the public's library and digital archive," 100% GPL, copyleft, and/or public domain, sponsored jointly by the Center for the Public Domain and UNC. Lots of people talk about free online publishing. Paul Jones just does it, day after day, year after year. Ask him whatever you want; we'll send 10 of the highest moderated questions to him and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

This week's Slashdot questions go to Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, before that SunSITE) since it first went live in August, 1992. Ibiblio hosts the world's largest Linux archive (including the LDP), plenty of streamed and downloadable music, the world's longest-running Web cartoon (Dr. Fun), and thousands of texts on topics too numerous to list here. This is truly "the public's library and digital archive," 100% GPL, copyleft, and/or public domain, sponsored jointly by the Center for the Public Domain and UNC. Lots of people talk about free online publishing. Paul Jones just does it, day after day, year after year. Ask him whatever you want; we'll send 10 of the highest moderated questions to him and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

This week's Slashdot questions go to Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, before that SunSITE) since it first went live in August, 1992. Ibiblio hosts the world's largest Linux archive (including the LDP), plenty of streamed and downloadable music, the world's longest-running Web cartoon (Dr. Fun), and thousands of texts on topics too numerous to list here. This is truly "the public's library and digital archive," 100% GPL, copyleft, and/or public domain, sponsored jointly by the Center for the Public Domain and UNC. Lots of people talk about free online publishing. Paul Jones just does it, day after day, year after year. Ask him whatever you want; we'll send 10 of the highest moderated questions to him and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

An anonymous reader writes "In a neverending effort to spread the word about free quality online programming books, here is a Python programming book. 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python', by Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Jeffrey Elkner is a copylefted work available in multiple formats at Green Tea Press: HTML , PDF, LaTeX. Compliments of the online books what's new page."

An anonymous reader writes "In a neverending effort to spread the word about free quality online programming books, here is a Python programming book. 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python', by Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Jeffrey Elkner is a copylefted work available in multiple formats at Green Tea Press: HTML , PDF, LaTeX. Compliments of the online books what's new page."

Anonymous American (Sherman Boyd) writes: "I was looking for a flexible, powerful distribution that makes it easy to build a 'custom' Linux box that meets my exacting specifications. I think I found it. Gentoo Linux has just released version 1.0 of their innovative meta-distribution and to celebrate I decided to throw it on my laptop and write this article based on my experiences." And good news for anyone interested in trying Gentoo: yesterday, Daniel Robbins announced the release of version 1.1a. Read on for AA's detailed look at putting Gentoo on his machine -- Gentoo has a different style than today's typical distributions, and it bears some explanation.

Gentoo solved many problems for me. Some distros install everything, whether you really need it or not. Not Gentoo; other than the base packages required for Linux to run, the only software installed on the system is the software you put there. Gentoo resolves dependencies automatically, eliminating RPM prerequisite hell. As an added bonus I got something I wasn't even expecting. Speed. Blinding, blazing, incredible speed.

The main advantage to the Gentoo distribution is Portage, a python-based ports system similar to BSD ports. For those of you unfamiliar with BSD ports, Portage is a package management tool that downloads and installs source instead of precompiled packages. When I need a program I download, install and compile it with one command:

emerge nmap

The above will download the nmap source code, compile and install it. Of course this method is slow, but it has its rewards. You can also opt to use prebuilt binaries if you are not extremely patient. It took me five hours to get the base Gentoo installed on my PIII with 128 megs of ram. It wasn't a big deal as I had other things to do, but I would like to see the installation process optimized so that it doesn't require any babysitting.

Gentoo is running two of my mission-critical servers right now, I consider it to be stable and mature. A warning, though: this is not a distribution for dummies. This is bare metal Linux, powerful and dangerous. If you do something without thinking you may fall into a bucket of pain.

Let's begin my story.

I download the iso from http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/releases/build /. There is a choice of install images here. My favorite way of installing Gentoo is to compile everything, a time consuming process. This method requires a slim 16-meg iso. You may want to grab an iso with pre-built binaries to speed things up, however. This fat iso weighs in at 103 meg. I download the big one with the prebuilt binaries even though I won't use them -- just in case.

I boot my laptop with my shiny new Gentoo CD. The Gentoo install uses isolinux by Peter Anvin. I like the fact that they don't obscure it, giving credit where it is due. It boots quickly and there is a PCI autodetection process, it shouldn't find much on my laptop. Interesting, it loads a SCSI module. Perhaps it has detected my IDE CD burner. Usually this will detect any PCI NIC cards that are installed, but it does not detect my PCMCIA device (of course). After the PCI detection I get a command prompt. I use nano (a small text editor) to open up install.txt, the excellent install doc. Usually these docs are sufficient but the latest ones can be found here:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html

Keeping the install doc open in this virtual terminal, I hit alt-f2 to open a new one. I begin by loading the pcmcia drivers and installing networking. This is all done at the command line ( insmod, ifconfig, route, dhcpcd, etc.). I use nano to add my DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf. A word of caution; get in the habit of always using the -w switch with nano. If you do not use the -w switch nano's word wrap feature will jack up your config files. I ping a reliable site, networking is up!

Next I partition my system using fdisk. I choose a simple layout with a swap partition, a root partition and a small boot partition. The boot partition remains unmounted during use, a nice precaution. For filesystems you have a choice of ext2, ext3, ReiserFS and XFS. In my personal experience I've noticed that Reiser performance really rocks when combined with SCSI drives, but as this is an IDE system I think I'll go with XFS. Besides, the XFS tools seem to be a lot more mature than the offerings from Reiser. I format and mount the partitions from the command line creating a /mnt/gentoo directory. I then untar the root filesystem; here I have the choice of the small tarball that requires you to compile everything or a larger tarball that contains pre-built binaries. If you untar the big guy you are almost finished with your install at this point. Using chroot and some scripts you chroot the /mnt/gentoo directory. From this point on you are operating under your new gentoo system.

The first thing I do under my chrooted system is issue this command:

emerge rsync

This downloads the latest version of the portage tree. The portage tree is found under /usr/portage and contains the ebuild scripts used to compile/install programs. Currently there are over 1000 up to date emerge sripts. Next I edit /etc/make.conf, here I can choose compiler settings. I optimize everything for i686. Now it's time to build the GNU compiler and libraries. I run the bootstrap script and leave for lunch. On my PIII 500 the boostrap process takes 2 hours and 2 minutes.

The second emerge command I issue is:

emerge system

Now emerge downloads, compiles and installs my base system packages. I sit back, relax and take the time to fax my legislators a rant about the DMCA. One hour and 30 minutes later it is finished.

Now it is time to download and install the kernel. First I make a link updating my timezone, and then I issue another emerge command:

emerge linux-sources

This grabs the latest kernel, 2.4.19, and drops the source in /usr/src/linux. Ten minutes have elapsed. Now comes the fun, compiling your kernel. That's right, everyone who installs Gentoo compiles their own kernel as a matter of process. I like this. There are some distributions out there that actually say you should never compile your own kernel. Shame on them. I use make menuconfig and the standard commands to compile my kernel. Since Gentoo uses devfs I select /dev file system support and I am also careful to compile in support for XFS. I don't have the kernel mount devfs automatically at boot as the Gentoo startup scripts take care of this for me. Virtual Memory file system support is also enabled.

At this point in time I get to choose a logger. My choices are sysklogd, syslog-ng or metalog. I choose metalog, because it's got the coolest name. I download, compile and install it using a single command:

emerge metalog

XFS has some nice utilities, I better install those. I have some other essential programs to install, and I'm feeling a bit lazy so I chain them all in one big command.

emerge xfsprogs;emerge bitchx;emerge vim;emerge links

At this point I'm feeling pretty 7-Up. I edit my /etc/fstab file, my /etc/hostname file and /etc/hosts. The passwd command is run to set the root passwd. I add my NIC module to the file /etc/modules.autoload and edit /etc/conf.d/net. conf.d/net allows me to configure my IP address and settings, default gateway and alias. I take a look at /etc/init.d/net.eth0, even though I don't need to edit it. I can then add it to the startup script using this command:

rc-update add net.eth0 default

This adds the script to the default runlevel to be executed at startup. Startup scripts are another place Gentoo really shines. The startup scripts have a system of dependencies. For example net.eth0 can depend on pcmcia. The pcmcia drivers get loaded before net.eth0 - this is good.

Next I install grub. If you haven't used grub before, it's nice. You can boot to a kernel directly from the grub shell, without having to edit a config file. lilo is still available, for those of you who prefer it. Gentoo likes to let you make the decisions.

I exit my chrooted shell and unmount all directories. Reboot! Gentoo comes up and the install process is complete.

The Gentoo install process has taught me a lot about Linux, and I like the fact that the command line is embraced, instead of hidden behind gui or scripts. I also like the speed (which is debatable since all I can supply is anecdotal evidence). I wasn't too happy about waiting five hours for everything to compile, but I think it was worth it. I can tell you it compiles and greps noticeably faster than other distros I have run on the exact same machines. I really enjoy using portage, and the packages seem to stay up to date -- if not bleeding edge. This is not a conservative distribution like Debian, however I like the aggressive and intelligent direction gentoo is taking.

If you are considering trying out Gentoo I highly suggest #gentoo on irc.openprojects.net. Also subscribe to the mailing lists found at www.gentoo.org. The Gentoo community has helped me out of several jams in the past, I think they will treat you good too.

While writing this, I received help from a lot of people. However I would like to personally thank the people I ripped off word for word. Thanks notafurry of www.kuro5hin.org for your pointed help with the stilted second paragraph and thank you Ween from #gentoo on openprojects.net for your clean description of portage.

Paul Boutin writes "The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past has returned to haunt many more of us: Google just announced the expansion of their Usenet archive back to May 3, 1981."Check out the past on Groups.google.com

pjones writes "Government Technology reports that "For reasons of national security and national pride, government officials in countries like China, France and Germany are increasingly adopting the free, open-source computer operating system known as Linux." Noted in the article are China's Red Flag, NSA's Security-Enhanced Linux and much more."

pjones writes: "This just in! Open Source is bad for companies and countries too. In a New York Times article (registration required), John Markoff reports that: "In a speech defending Microsoft's business model, to be given on Thursday at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized." Singled out for particular rebuke and scorn are IBM and the famous GPL and its author Richard Stallman. Who will be there to cheer Craig on?" See also ESR's dispatch on same. (Read below for update with time and place.)

Update: 05/03 01:55 PM by T : cananian points to this announcement on time and place. The upshot: from noon to 1:30 p.m, in room 1-70 of NYU's Kaufman Management Center (KMEC), 44 West 4th Street.

Slashing back tonight are bits and pieces on optical transistors; a genuine linux toaster; words from Nintendo's president on the real status of the Gamecube; and another potentially nice push in the world of digital archives. Please enjoy.

Larry Ellison, watch your back. meforpc writes: "More on LTSP (Linux terminal server project): Riverdale (www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux) decided to make a 'poster child' to get the word out on their project; to do this Bryan Grimshaw made a Linux machine inside of a toaster oven. The idea behind the toaster is to show the ease of setting up a Linux terminal/server network. It's really cool and looks great. (I want one)."

"Oooh, that's one hot system! If you sell it, I hope the buyer doesn't get burned. Might this sort of thing have a Dark Side? Nice rack -- Smmmmmokin'!" Sigh. I've stopped now. The worst pun you can come up with will be rewarded with an official Slashdot groan of derision :)

Soon all will be optical. BdosError writes: "Scientists in Japan seem to have developed an optical transistor, as explained in this article, which I snipped from the Rapidly Changing Face of Computing newsletter. This could go nicely with the optical switching technology mentioned earlier, as it would eliminate the need to convert the electrical signals to/from optical. Plus, it would be a huge benefit for building fast systems which generate less heat in general.

Let's have no comments about the possibilities for a Beowulf cluster."

Well ... no more comments. But actually, why not? This sounds like a good thing for clustered research computers, no?

Of course, we'll see what hits shelves ... TheZalm writes: "The article about Gamecube being in danger is a misrepresentation of the facts. Hiroshi Yamauchi said only that he would reconsider his launch plan, and possibly place a small delay on the launch. See this article at IGN."

Of course, that's what Sega repeatedly said about the Dreamcast, too. The gamecube sounds cool, so I hope it arrives, but it's obviously coming into a hotly contested market.

Commemorating the banal and the momentous. fizban writes: "According to this AP news story, CNN plans to spend the next few years digitizing its entire video archive and making it available to the public over the internet. Excellent! Just think of the multimedia reports the kids of tomorrow will be able to make for their class projects..."

The article skirts the issue of licensing and payment; hopefully CNN will see fit to make at least some of its content free, but I'd be surprised it that's more than a sampling.

The progress may be mind-numbingly slow, but thanks to things like Project Gutenberg, ibiblio and the Internet Moving Image Archive, more and more free content is arriving for us to read, watch and use. ("And, he groused, "it would be nice if all images made with our tax dollars would be available online as well.")

Bob Young prefaces his answers to your questions by saying, "You may notice I've ducked some of the answers below - there is a reason for this. My role at Red Hat these days is as Chairman of the board. Matthew Szulik is Red Hat's CEO and will be a better person to answer some of the specific issues that these questions raise.... "I have been spending more of my time recently working with Laurie Racine and her team at the Center for the Public Domain, www.centerpd.org. The Center's goal is to help improve the quality of the debate on Intellectual Property issues in the public arena. Our support of ibiblio.org (formerly Sunsite and Metalab) is just one example of the kinds of things we are doing to improve the ecosystem that makes up open source in specific and the public domain of knowledge generally.

"My answers will not be "official" Red Hat policy (that would be Matthew's job), or even the Center's official positions, but rather my personal take on the answers to your questions."

------------

Do you think a recession will help RedHat/Linux?
by donturn

Bob,

We had an Ask Slashdot a few days ago wondering whether a recession will help Linux or not. Since you're the CEO of RedHat, you probably have a better idea as to what effect a recession will have on RedHat and Linux. So, do you think you will gain more market share during a recession than you would otherwise?

Bob:

As above, I haven't been CEO of Red Hat for quite a while now (which is why Red Hat Inc is doing so well - but that's another story ;-) but here's my take on that question:

Back in the early days of Red Hat we used to sit around debating how we were going to get MIS directors to take us seriously, when one of our directors, Frank Batten Jr (now involved with open source database company Great Bridge) would insist that we shouldn't be trying to sell the MIS directors at all. He insisted we should focus our sales efforts on the CFOs (Chief Financial Officers).

His logic was simply that the open source price/performance ratio was simply so much better than the proprietary software vendors that the CFO's would eventually override the MIS dept's preference for the safe, tried and true, binary-only proprietary software model they were used to, and require that they consider open source alternatives.

In a strong economy the CFOs were willing to fund the MIS directors budgets. In a slowing economy CFO's start to scrutinize every expense much more carefully. The existence of the lower cost open source alternatives are going to be very attractive to many companies who are currently paying millions of dollars of royalties to software upgrades they really would rather not have to purchase.

Who decides what goes in and how?
by Can

I'd like some insight on how the decision is made to include something in Red Hat Linux, how quickly to roll in new releases of software, etc.

For example, I've seen pre-releases of KDE get included and updated in rawhide (and I believe in actual Red Hat releases) rather often, but even the individual GNOME components are almost never updated until well after a full stable release is announced. There are other examples, but that's the main one that comes to mind.

There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software in Red Hat to this day. So, I'm just curious how you make these technical decisions.

Bob:

There is no one method. It varies depending on which component of Red Hat Linux is involved, and what the development community around that component's advice to us is. Ask Slashdot to arrange an interview with one of our engineering leaders and you'll get better answers than I can give.

But... "There also still seems to be a lot of 0.x version software in Red Hat to this day" .. is a -much- smaller issue than it used to be. It was only a few years ago that we used to ship beta code as part of our official releases simply because there were so few alternatives.

Today the primary reason we ship any beta code is so that the community of users who rely on Red Hat get more insight into where our technology is going and more opportunity to help influence what it does, how it does it, and how reliable future releases will be. Keep in mind that a big percentage of Red Hat users and developers still, to this day, do not have reliable high speed access and rely on CD-Roms as the source of the sources.

Would you really recommend it for desktop use?
by update()

I'm a Linux enthusiast and contributor but I still don't see where it's "ready for the desktop" as I would understand that phrase.

Bob, if you had a non-technical friend or relative who currently uses Windows, Quicken, Office, IE and AOL, could you in good conscience tell him it would be in his best interest to use Linux instead? What exactly would be in it for him?

Bob:

Er, -I- am that non-technical friend, and I use a Red Hat Linux-based desktop exclusively.

The real answer to your question goes like this: No one (other than maybe some Slashdot reader) buys operating systems. People buy applications and then chose the operating system that best runs those applications. If you need to do desktop publishing you may go into a CompUSA store, find a copy of Aldus Pagemaker and then read on the side of the box that it runs on Windows or MacOS so you buy a computer with one of those OSes to run your app.

If you work as I do: on the net (Netscape) including all the net-based apps that I can run from my browser, reading email (exmh), and printing the occasional Word file (Applixware), you can do all these things on a Linux box every bit as easily and a great deal more reliably than on any of the 1980s legacy OSes. On the other hand if you need some application that only runs on Windows you may have problems with a Linux-only computer.

Fortunately, the future of the desktop is not in the 1980s applications that required you to load the application yourself, run it, back it up, and otherwise play sys-admin to your own computer. The future of the desktop will be using Internet appliances where the applications will sit out on the net (or your corporate Intranet) and you just download the small pieces that allow you to use those applications without having to take responsibility for them. Your sys-admin will not have to walk down the hall to have hands-on access to your machine. He or she may be in Australia and will support your machine remotely. This model requires a "real" operating system and will spell the end to a lot of the OS lock-in that all the Windows 95 and 98-based apps on the shelves of CompUSA represent.

Why invest in RedHat?
by Merk

RedHat has the biggest name recognition of all the Linux distributions. To many non-tech types Linux == RedHat. And you are now breaking even, yet despite that RedHat's stock went from $80 a share to less than $5 and there doesn't seem to be a sign of that turning around.

What do you say to people who ask why they should invest in RedHat? Also, as a high-tech company I'm sure employees got stock options, how are they dealing with the crash in share prices and how do you convince them their options are still worth something?

Bob:

As I've been preaching to anyone who would listen since long before Red Hat went public, Red Hat is a good investment if you believe that the proprietary binary-only software model as practiced by most of the software industry today is broken.

It is broken in that it does not conform to what customers expect from suppliers in free-market democracies, namely that the customer is normally in control of the customer-vendor relationship. It is only in the software industry, as this industry has evolved over the last thirty years, where the vendor is in control of his customers in an almost feudal way.

In the middle ages the feudal system was based on the ruling classes keeping the population under absolute control by not giving them any insight into the laws they were governed under. In effect you could be thrown into jail for breaking a law, and the policing authority did not have to tell you what law you broke or why it was in place.

Software users today are prohibited from making any changes to the software that they are building their organizations around, whether to add features their users desperately need, or stop their servers from crashing unexpectedly, or to patch a security hole, completely arbitrarily. In fact they can be thrown in jail for improving the systems they are using. If you don't believe me just read any shrink-wrapped proprietary software license.

Changing this industry is not going to happen overnight. So buying a portfolio of open source companies stocks, including Red Hat, may not pay off in the short term, or it might -- I'm not an expert on the stock market. But open source is solving a major structural problem in the software industry on behalf of the consumers of the products of that industry. The companies who enable this change to occur on behalf of their customers are going to be good investments in the long term.

Your impressions on the recent MS Interview
by Amoeba

[Earlier] on Slashdot we got responses from an interview of MS exec Doug Miller and he touched upon some areas of Linux that caused a lot of debate and discussion in the forum. My question to you is, would you skim through Doug's reponses and provide us with your counterarguments or comments?

Bob:

Doug Miller and I go way back. All I can say is how disappointed I am that Doug has joined the "dark side". He is a really decent human being.

He used to provide the exact opposite answers to the ones he provided in that interview and he did so with much more conviction.

(Sorry Doug.)

Also see 9 below.

Mandrake
by Xenex

Linux-Mandrake started off simply as basically a copy of Red Hat Linux with KDE installed (which was the most advanced desktop environment at that time). However since 'growing' from Red Hat, it has become a distibution of it's own, with a incredibly simple install, more features/applications (ReiserFS, more intergrated Gnome/KDE menu...), Pentium optimised applications, and generally is more 'bleeding edge'.

How do you feel about the fact that Red Hat Linux was 'the womb' of what would now have to be considered one of the strongest Linux distros for the desktop, and a major competitior to Red Hat on the desktop with it's claimed "99% Red Hat compatibility"?

Bob:

Mandrake is a great example of why open source is so valuable for the user of software.

The software using marketplace is not a simple single market. It is a vast collection of markets. Software developers who need good C and Java compilers are as different from dentists who need good dental office billing systems as two markets can get.

If Mandrake do their job properly they will serve some market(s) better than Red Hat does.

So for all those potential Linux-users who might not use Red Hat Linux because it does not include some application that they need, or support in a language Red Hat does not offer, we can point them to Mandrake.

The result is more choice in the marketplace. The customer wins, which is the whole point.

Security
by Rupert

Recently we've seen several worms attacking vulnerabilities in the default install of Red Hat Linux. What is being done to make the default installation more newbie-friendly from a security point of view? The average desktop user probably doesn't want or need BIND, do they?

Bob:

I have to duck this one. Security deserves precise and detailed answers and I'm not qualified to give them.

Other than to say the price of security is eternal vigilance.

Also, you should check out Red Hat Network. (www.redhat.com)

Competing against MacOSX
by banky

With MacOSX arriving as a desktop Unix (more or less) backed by a known, (sometimes) respected name, do you consider Apple to be a serious competitor, the same as Microsoft? Would Red Hat ever consider a PPC release to try and steer people away from MacOSX? Or, instead, do you think Apple will remain largely a niche player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose viability of Unix?

Bob:

"Apple will remain largely a niche player, but one that adds weight to the all-purpose viability of Unix."

This is -exactly- what I think. Go to the head of the class.

Standardization
by milo_Gwalthny

Bob -

Doug Miller, a Microsoft executive, was recently interviewed for Slashdot. Many of the questions posed were regarding the competitiveness of Linux with Windows in the medium-term. To paraphrase, Doug said that there was no viable business model based on Linux, that the lack of standardization (ie. KDE v. Gnome) would be enough of an economic disincentive to commercial application developers to prevent them from venturing into the market.

On the face of it, he seems to have a point. What do you think? Does Linux need to be herded down the path towards a super-majority recognized 'standard' to be successful, or can the type of open-source movement to date provide enough tools and applications to drive Linux to dominance?

Bob:

Saying that there is no business model to open source is like saying there is no business model to democracy.

Miller's arguments are red herrings thrown to distract the debate from the real issues. The real issue is not standards or technical compatibility with specific pieces of binary-only software. In an open source world compatibility is not dependent on whether a binary-only supplier adopts the standard as written or not. Whoever is trying to achieve compatibility simply has to check the sources. So the games that the binary-only proprietary software vendors play with standards go away. The real issue is where are the innovations of the next generation going to come from. The Millers of this world think that their employers should have preferential rights on offering those innovations.

This control over future innovation is being assisted by the trend in our legislatures worldwide to expand Intellectual Property (patents and copyrights, otherwise known as government granted monopolies) rights. These enable corporations to maximize their profits at the expense of the citizens in our society and are not just bad for our democracy, it is bad for business.

Let me be clear: Intellectual Property rights (IP) such as patents and copyrights are good things. But like anything in life too much of a good thing no longer is good. Too little vitamin D and you get bone diseases. Too much vitamin D will kill you. IP can be useful to independent inventors to protect their invention from being copied and marketed by larger distributors without compensation to the inventor. But today IP is mostly used by the armies of lawyers employed by the largest technology and publishing companies to squash potential competitors who don't have access to equivalent legal resources.

Just one example: For the first hundred years of copyright, copyright terms lasted less than 20 years. In the last 40 years copyright has been extended to 70 years plus the lifetime of the author. How government granted monopolies, justified as a means for providing incentive to authors to create additional works, achieves that goal *70 years after the author's death* mystifies me.

Needless to say this change in the structure of the rules that govern our society was not promoted by authors. It was promoted by the people who truly benefit from the extended IP rules, namely the publishers. Why we as a society are so keen to reward global publishing companies at the expense of the authors, musicians, researchers, artists, software developers, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs is another mystery.

All of these groups, in fact our society in general relies on the public access to knowledge. For every Metallica who worries that they will not be well enough paid for their next album there are literally hundreds of thousands of musicians whose ability to create and perform is being gradually eroded by the additional IP rules being imposed on us by our elected officials in the name of supporting the technology and publishing industries.

(For more detail on this check out www.centerpd.org.)

Giving the major global publishing and technology companies ever-greater government granted monopolies on vast definitions of technology (think "one-click" patents on a website) is inconsistent with how free-market democracies are supposed to work. Then arguing, as Miller does, that any alternative model cannot be legitimate because it does not generate the monopoly profits his employer collects would be a joke - if were not for so many of our legislators buying this line of reasoning.

I don't want to discourage you from writing to your representative, or your member of parliament, they need to hear from you. But here's a more positive thought on this topic: The cool thing about free-market democracies is that the citizens are the consumers. So you can sometimes solve societal problems in the marketplace. This is where Red Hat's and the rest of the open source suppliers opportunity lies.

Linux and open source is succeeding simply because it works in the customers interest better than the proprietary binary-only model does. It gets around the innovation deadening impact of software patents. It avoids the creativity sapping effect of locking up knowledge and expression behind 70 year copyrights.

While open source may not be a business model any more than democracy is a business model, it is possible to use open source to serve your customers better than the competition. Matthew Szulik and his team have driven Red Hat from revenues of less than $15 million when we went public 21 months ago, to over $100 million today with gross margins in excess of 55%.

On one thing Doug Miller and I agree: serving your customers is how you build great companies. I just don't see how locking your customers into inflexible binary-only proprietary technologies over which they have no control can be defined as serving them. I guess we still have some work to do getting the word out that there is a more robust, reliable and economic way to use technology, it's called open source.

Red Hat Acquisitions
by Kostya

I noticed that while Red Hat was valued highly, Red Hat used its funding to purchase companies like Cygnus and C2Net. Escpecially with the purchase of Cygnus, you appear to be consildating the infrastructure that makes linux viable commercially. One could conjecture that you are trying to provide developer tools and resources, both as a product and as a way to build into Linux (as in the motto "it is the developers/ISVs stupid!"). Red Hat is currently valued much lower than it was at the top of the hype, but one could argue that these (and other) strategic acquisitions give Red Hat an edge over the competition or the chance at surviving the tech stock maelstrom.

Q: How do you see these acquisitions as helping Red Hat and its position in the market?

Bob:

In general the answer to the above is: yes. As in, yes we see the need to offer comprehensive and high quality development tools as extremely important to the future of the platform we are promoting.

The only point to be clear on is who we see as competition. Red Hat's success to date has been due to our focus on the real competition. When we started the whole Linux/open source market was not big enough to pay our credit card bills, much less the rent.

So we new we had to take customers from the established industry leaders. We knew we could do this by delivering benefits that those billion dollar competitors were not willing to offer their customers.

This benefit was the control over the technology we were asking them to invest in, that open source enabled us to deliver.

Which is why we don't see Mandrake as the competition. We have products and services we can sell to a Mandrake user. The same is not true of the big binary-only proprietary software suppliers.

Hardware support
by wowbagger

Unfortunately, most hardware vendors support Microsoft because MS has the largest share of the market and they know it will pay to support MS with drivers.

Linux is not in that state, save for (perhaps) networking devices. Has RedHat considered helping to fund driver development for other forms of hardware? I'm thinking mostly of 3D accelerated video cards (by helping to fund the DRI group), but other items (scanners, USB- IDE interfaces, etc.) would be nice too.

Bob:

Yup, this has historically been a problem. Red Hat (and many of the other leading Linux distributors) has contributed drivers, and has contributed development resources to other device driver developers.

But more and more manufacturers recognize that they will sell more of their boards, add-ons, peripherals, and systems if they make the small effort of ensuring that it will run the latest Linux kernel and libraries. For example HP is now actively writing open source Linux printer drivers for the popular HP printers.

- 30 -

Yes, that Bob Young. The one who helped endow online information resource ibiblio.org, but is better known for his role as co-founder and Chairman of Red Hat. Ask him anything you want, but please hold it down to one question per post. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated inquiries to Bob (who is in England this week), and he'll send back his answers just as soon as he can.

A hefty handful of updates for you in tonight's Slashback, including: more information on how to make your plastic fish talk; more on the sounds-too-good-to-be-true Delux DVD player; and things that hopefully do not go boom in the woods. Also, shedding some more light on the Sun E10K review we ran a few days ago.

Make that fish say what you want it to say! vonmar writes: "Full details of the Boogie Bass Hack are now available, including schematics, sourcecode, and documentation. All the information should be there now for anyone with a soldering iron to make the Bass do their bidding!"

Here's the original story we ran about that crazy fish.

These are the things that go BOOM. Paul Jones of ibiblio writes: "To follow up on your nsa star hut story, take a look at this: a 40-year-old abandoned hydrogen bomb in eastern NC."

North Carolinians (Carolingians?) can sleep relatively easy though: according to the article, when a pair of hydrogren bombs went down with the plane which was carrying them, "Safety mechanisms designed to prevent unintended or unauthorized detonation served their function, and a historic nuclear catastrophe was averted. But published sources disagree on how close the people of Wayne County came to suffering fiery annihilation." Please don't retrieve this, anyone.

And EMlNEM writes with a cool addition as well: "Here are some pictures of the NSA station you had a story about."

Not so deluxe after all ... bluephone writes: "Well, it's been a while since the news of the Dulux DVD player hit Slashdot, and my question for my fellow /. inmates is can anyone post some FIRST HAND information about it? No more marketroid tripe, I'm talking about someone who ordered it, received it, played with it, etc. Was the company responsive? Did you actually get it? Is the playback quality good? Are the features promised actually there and functional? Currently, they claim to be out of stock, and will have more on the 15th of January, which could mena they've folded shop and run with the money, or that they sold like hotcakes. I want to know which it really is. A quick Google search revealed no actual post-testing reviews."

Adam Alexander writes: " Late in November, I read the ask slashdot article about the Dulux DVD/MP3/Game player and followed the link (http://www.gamedvdplayer.com) to purchase the item. I paid with PayPal (extremely hard to get a refund) and it turns out that I have never received the item, and although the company's web site is still up, they do not return phone calls or emails. I have set up a web site (http://oreo.donet.com/duluxhelp) for discussion between Dulux customers in order to trade information about (for example) ways to contact the company or success in getting refunds. I have a feeling that there may be many more Slashdot readers in the same position and I would like all of us to benefit from each other's experiences."

Well said. Who else can contribute words of wisdom (or chagrin) about what so far appears to be a non-deluxe player?

And now this newsflash with news ... on Flash! Peter Santangeli of Macromedia sent this email to the bugtraq mailing list, good reading for anyone interested in the Flash insecurity reported earlier.

As was posted earlier to BUGTRAQ, an issue has been discovered with the Macromedia Flash Player that shows a possible buffer overflow error when the player encounters a maliciously or incorrectly created SWF file. After an investigation, and consultation with the reporting engineer, Macromedia has determined the following:

• The data being accessed is located entirely in a dynamically allocated structure in the heap space of the application.
• The data access is limited to reading the information. At no time is the buffer in question ever written to. Neither the heap, nor the stack is written to during this processing, and at no time does this lead to the execution of arbitrary data as native instructions.

Given the above information, it is Macromedia's belief that the error in question, though unfortunate, does not constitute a significant security risk. The effects of this defect are limited to the crashing of the users client (denial of service).

On a personal note, I regret that the actual bug report did not reach the appropriate people at Macromedia in a timely manner. We do take security very seriously in the development of our products, and are looking in to mechanisms to ensure that this does not happen again. For a starter, we will be instituting a new email address by which these reports can be directly sent to the appropriate engineers.

Peter Santangeli
Vice President of Engineering, Flash and FreeHand
Macromedia Inc.

Credit where credit is due. Josh McCormick, who wrote this review on epinions.com of the heftily-priced Sun E10K server, was offered a call from Philip Ferreira, editor of Reviewboard Magazine, to discuss "what happened" with McCormick's review when a very similar review not crediting McCormick ran on the Reviewboard site, and was linked to by Slashdot (since removed, for reasons partly explained in this post from chabotc of Reviewboard). That message and the threads it spawned make clear what a big mess this was. Thanks to Josh for sticking up for his work. Here's his response to Reviewboard:

Phillip,

Considering the wild and numerous stories that were given to explain what has happened, you'll forgive me if I don't want to hear one more. I view the credibility of any explanation I would get as approaching zero.

Further, I pretty much already have what I wanted out of all of this. The article removed from your site (although it is still on the chabotc.com site), and recognition that I was the original author. There isn't much more that I can gain from having a conversation.

What I gained from this was an interesting story to share with my friends, and a better appreciation for what it takes to "prove" something online.

At this point, I'm satisified to drop it and go my seperate way.

Josh McCormick

A hefty handful of updates for you in tonight's Slashback, including: more information on how to make your plastic fish talk; more on the sounds-too-good-to-be-true Delux DVD player; and things that hopefully do not go boom in the woods. Also, shedding some more light on the Sun E10K review we ran a few days ago.

Make that fish say what you want it to say! vonmar writes: "Full details of the Boogie Bass Hack are now available, including schematics, sourcecode, and documentation. All the information should be there now for anyone with a soldering iron to make the Bass do their bidding!"

Here's the original story we ran about that crazy fish.

These are the things that go BOOM. Paul Jones of ibiblio writes: "To follow up on your nsa star hut story, take a look at this: a 40-year-old abandoned hydrogen bomb in eastern NC."

North Carolinians (Carolingians?) can sleep relatively easy though: according to the article, when a pair of hydrogren bombs went down with the plane which was carrying them, "Safety mechanisms designed to prevent unintended or unauthorized detonation served their function, and a historic nuclear catastrophe was averted. But published sources disagree on how close the people of Wayne County came to suffering fiery annihilation." Please don't retrieve this, anyone.

And EMlNEM writes with a cool addition as well: "Here are some pictures of the NSA station you had a story about."

Not so deluxe after all ... bluephone writes: "Well, it's been a while since the news of the Dulux DVD player hit Slashdot, and my question for my fellow /. inmates is can anyone post some FIRST HAND information about it? No more marketroid tripe, I'm talking about someone who ordered it, received it, played with it, etc. Was the company responsive? Did you actually get it? Is the playback quality good? Are the features promised actually there and functional? Currently, they claim to be out of stock, and will have more on the 15th of January, which could mena they've folded shop and run with the money, or that they sold like hotcakes. I want to know which it really is. A quick Google search revealed no actual post-testing reviews."

Adam Alexander writes: " Late in November, I read the ask slashdot article about the Dulux DVD/MP3/Game player and followed the link (http://www.gamedvdplayer.com) to purchase the item. I paid with PayPal (extremely hard to get a refund) and it turns out that I have never received the item, and although the company's web site is still up, they do not return phone calls or emails. I have set up a web site (http://oreo.donet.com/duluxhelp) for discussion between Dulux customers in order to trade information about (for example) ways to contact the company or success in getting refunds. I have a feeling that there may be many more Slashdot readers in the same position and I would like all of us to benefit from each other's experiences."

Well said. Who else can contribute words of wisdom (or chagrin) about what so far appears to be a non-deluxe player?

And now this newsflash with news ... on Flash! Peter Santangeli of Macromedia sent this email to the bugtraq mailing list, good reading for anyone interested in the Flash insecurity reported earlier.

As was posted earlier to BUGTRAQ, an issue has been discovered with the Macromedia Flash Player that shows a possible buffer overflow error when the player encounters a maliciously or incorrectly created SWF file. After an investigation, and consultation with the reporting engineer, Macromedia has determined the following:

• The data being accessed is located entirely in a dynamically allocated structure in the heap space of the application.
• The data access is limited to reading the information. At no time is the buffer in question ever written to. Neither the heap, nor the stack is written to during this processing, and at no time does this lead to the execution of arbitrary data as native instructions.

Given the above information, it is Macromedia's belief that the error in question, though unfortunate, does not constitute a significant security risk. The effects of this defect are limited to the crashing of the users client (denial of service).

On a personal note, I regret that the actual bug report did not reach the appropriate people at Macromedia in a timely manner. We do take security very seriously in the development of our products, and are looking in to mechanisms to ensure that this does not happen again. For a starter, we will be instituting a new email address by which these reports can be directly sent to the appropriate engineers.

Peter Santangeli
Vice President of Engineering, Flash and FreeHand
Macromedia Inc.

Credit where credit is due. Josh McCormick, who wrote this review on epinions.com of the heftily-priced Sun E10K server, was offered a call from Philip Ferreira, editor of Reviewboard Magazine, to discuss "what happened" with McCormick's review when a very similar review not crediting McCormick ran on the Reviewboard site, and was linked to by Slashdot (since removed, for reasons partly explained in this post from chabotc of Reviewboard). That message and the threads it spawned make clear what a big mess this was. Thanks to Josh for sticking up for his work. Here's his response to Reviewboard:

Phillip,

Considering the wild and numerous stories that were given to explain what has happened, you'll forgive me if I don't want to hear one more. I view the credibility of any explanation I would get as approaching zero.

Further, I pretty much already have what I wanted out of all of this. The article removed from your site (although it is still on the chabotc.com site), and recognition that I was the original author. There isn't much more that I can gain from having a conversation.

What I gained from this was an interesting story to share with my friends, and a better appreciation for what it takes to "prove" something online.

At this point, I'm satisified to drop it and go my seperate way.

Josh McCormick

Matt Knuppel writes: "There will be a discussion with Paul Jones, Founder and Director of ibiblio/MetaLab/SunSITE, on Red Hat Center's Center Stage webcast on Tuesday, November 28th at 8:00 pm EST. It will be an hour long. Paul will be discussing ibiblio, open source, and contributor-run libraries. Questions for Paul can be submitted to matt@metalab.unc.edu."

Matt Knuppel writes: "There will be a discussion with Paul Jones, Founder and Director of ibiblio/MetaLab/SunSITE, on Red Hat Center's Center Stage webcast on Tuesday, November 28th at 8:00 pm EST. It will be an hour long. Paul will be discussing ibiblio, open source, and contributor-run libraries. Questions for Paul can be submitted to matt@metalab.unc.edu."

Darrell Estabrook wrote to us about IT Olympics, a satirical look at what the Olympics would be like in the IT world. Pretty amusing - and timely, although listening to some of the Olympic announcers is comical in its own right. [Update by nik] I've s/com/org/ in the URL. And on a related theme, the Usenet Olympics are always worth a laugh, ditto the Spam Olympics.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

It says on the iBiblio FAQ page that iBiblio "stands above other digital libraries" by maintaining "a close relation to the open source models for development and management of collections." The FAQ page also says, "We're all about freedom, man! Free Tibet, free Burma, Free Love, you get the picture. We offer a free platform for the exchange of free thought. We host tons of cultural sites like the DocSouth Project, Zen@iBiblio, and North Carolina Raves (all of which can be seen from our collections index). We are also one of the first servers to mirror the original Linux kernel, so you can tell we're big on free software, too."

Paul Jones, listed on the who we are page as "fearless leader," has been the project's director since it began in 1992. He is a computer scientist, a poet, and a professor of both journalism and library science. He has eclectic tastes in music, a high forehead, hair that ripples over his shoulders, and speaks in an accent you could call Mayberry PhD; imagine a good ol' boy-talking leftover hippie who co-wrote The Web Server Book (which later morphed into The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition, and you have Paul pegged -- and some insight into the nature of the iBiblio collection, which could be loosely defined as 'information and amusements Paul likes or needs or thinks a whole lot of other people might like or need.'

The iBiblio collection policy is vague; "eclectic" is the polite word. There is a fair amount of southern U.S. culture (the Mayberry part) and plenty of scholarly studies (the PhD part), and lots of everything else. The Web's longest-running comic (since 1993), Dr. Fun, is hosted by iBiblio. So is the Virtual Shtetl, an online repository for Yiddish language and culture.

The current iBiblio name was chosen, in large part, because it was available. Paul says, "Naming anything on the Internet these days is a combination of what's available and what you're trying to say." The old SunSite name had to go when the site's relationship with original sponsor Sun Microsytems (amicably) dissolved several years ago. Then, Paul says, people both in the free software community and the rest of the world seemed to associate the MetaLab name almost entirely with the software aspect of the site (which only makes up about half of it), and when the latest sponsor, red hat center, donated $4 million to the project, a name change was in order -- but not to one that had either redness or hatness in it.

"Bob Young felt like since this was the first and biggest [charitable] project he had done," Paul says, and since they were going to have many changes in the site, "... he also wanted to try to do a little bit different name. He noticed when he kept certain names, say like red hat center and Red Hat, Incorporated, that people got them confused." So instead of a Red Hat-boosting name, it became iBiblio, a made-up word that alludes well to librararyness -- and is easy to remember once you get your tongue around it correctly, pronoucing the first "i" long so that you are saying, "eye - bib - lee - oh."

Right now the amount of material iBiblio can hold is limited only by server capacity. "We have plenty of bandwidth," Paul says. And now, new hardware is going online steadily, paid for in large part by the Red Hat center grant. It all runs Linux for reasons that go beyond the current sponsorship. Indeed, the MetaLab/SunSite relationship with Linux started before Red Hat was formed, and came about almost entirely by accident.

"Originally," Paul says, "the first U.S. [Linux] mirror site was for a brief time a place called banjo, at concert dot net, and that's right up the road from us. I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit -- and they were getting a little bit of traffic, several hundred file transfers a day. It was enough to make them nervous. They were a small company, just getting going.

"Jonathan Magid, who in fact still works with me, was an undergrad who was interested in operating systems, and he came to me and said, 'You know, there are these guys that are cooperatively building an operating system, and you can have it.' I said, 'Oh yeah? When can I run it?' He said, 'Well, you can only run the kernel, the rest'll be coming soon.' At first I said, 'We don't really need another operating system.' I already had a Mac, we had Suns, and we had PCs, so what did we need another operating system for? He [Jonathan] said, 'This one, you can actually work on yourself if you want to,' and I thought this was kind of nice, we'll try that out, and we sort of rescued it from banjo before they got in trouble [over the traffic], and we've never stopped [hosting Linux] since."

Paul has no accurate count of the number of Linux and free software files currently hosted at iBiblio.org. He says, "I know the separate distros, each one is an entire tree of its own, we carry about thirty-some distros. We have between four and six thousand community-contributed files. Some are active and some are now becoming historic, but the librarian part of me doesn't want to throw anything away."

In a little side note, Paul adds, "After Jonathan got overwhelmed as the Linux portion took off, I said, 'We need to find somebody who really cares about this who will come in and help us out.' Jonathan suggested a friend, Eric Troan, who he said would work for 'a couple of t-shirts.'"

Troan stuck around for a while, but eventually got hired by then-new Red Hat (Paul says Troan was Red Hat employee number four), and another Eric, surname Raymond, got involved and continued his participation until, Paul says, he more-or-less accidentally found himself flying yon and hither speechifying and writing as the prime spokesman for the entire open source movement.

Paul cannot remember exactly how long Raymond worked on MetaLab; "You'd have to ask Raymond," he says. "About three years, I think, but I'm not positive."

This lack of certainty, this semi-anarchy, this sense of people coming and going, each bringing something to the whole, shows why iBiblio is inextricably linked to the free software and Open Source movements in ways that extend beyond software into both management style and general philosophy. Some volunteers have made noticeable, even site-shaking contribitions. Paul credits Eric Raymond, for instance, with bringing Trove, an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites, with him.

But other equally-valuable contributions may be less visible than Trove, and many iBiblio contributors may be unknown within the Linux, open source, and free software communities, where the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] or the Vietnam Multimedia Archives are not daily discussion topics.

The point to all this is that open source software and concepts have uses beyond the confines of the programming community, and that iBiblio.org, with new money from a foundation that owes its funding to open source software, is an endless experiment in open source and library science (which might also be called "library art" in the iBiblio context), and how a combination of the two can evolve as a public resource if given money, time, and a little (but not too much) guidance.

Simon Spero writes: "Metalab, the site formerly known as SunSITE, is now www.ibiblio.org . This change has been made in response to a donation by Bob Young and Mark Ewing of Redhat of $4 million; this grant will be used to apply the techniques and philosophies of the Open Source Movement to more traditional kinds of information, creating the first of a new kind of digital library. " Metalab URLs will continue to work. Here's the FAQ and some more press coverage. Really the name change is secondary (I still hadn't stopped using sunsite bookmarks) but this could be really cool.

Simon Spero writes: "Metalab, the site formerly known as SunSITE, is now www.ibiblio.org . This change has been made in response to a donation by Bob Young and Mark Ewing of Redhat of $4 million; this grant will be used to apply the techniques and philosophies of the Open Source Movement to more traditional kinds of information, creating the first of a new kind of digital library. " Metalab URLs will continue to work. Here's the FAQ and some more press coverage. Really the name change is secondary (I still hadn't stopped using sunsite bookmarks) but this could be really cool.